Get Off My Lawn, Part VI

If I'm reading the paper, and I see an editorial written by the lovely Mr. Hering, and it has the title of "Keep science in its place," what do you think happens?

Yup. I have a mental image of science in the kitchen in the 1950s, baking a pie, complete with apron.

Then I get annoyed.

Hering's latest attempt at making his readers dumb is on the decision made in 2001 regarding water levels in the Klamath River Basin.

(Note: Go read the first comment below the editorial. It's pretty good.)

This is his key point:

Science can never be allowed to substitute for political decision making. If it ever is, we might as well call off any further elections and turn every national question over to the people running the National Academy of Sciences.

In the case of the Klamath Basin and water levels, what's coming out is that the science regarding the necessary water levels for fish survival said that if the water level got low enough, farmers were going to have to lose some of the water they usually got to keep the fish alive. They didn't like it, and what happened is that Dick Cheney intervened. The result? The farmers got their water and something like 70,000 fish died that year because they didn't have enough water. The fishing industry is still recovering from that, six years later. Oh, and Cheney's political intervention resulted in bad science being used to create policy. (See this Washington Post story for more on Cheney's intervention.)

Getting back to Hering's point, I think he's quite consciously misrepresenting what happens when science and policy collide. In the Klamath case, this is what he says:

In 2001 federal agencies cut off irrigation water to the farming economy of the Klamath Basin. The farmers complained bitterly that they were losing their farms. They didn’t complain to the agency scientists; they complained to the people in elected federal offices. In 2002 the farmers were allocated more water, and there are continuing discussions among various interests on how to resolve the situation in the long run.

That’s the way our system is supposed to work.

Um, notice anything missing? I do - the fact that the result was the die-off of a massive number of fish. And the "discussion," as he labels it, is one of the most bitterly contested fights over water rights in the United States. I have a friend who was the first person in a long time to actually get all the parties to sit down and talk, and this is nowhere near over, and for a long time was nowhere near as civil as he makes it sound.

Anyway, Hering's strange conception of a system in which science is ignored when making policy - because that's what he describes as the system working in the above paragraph - is not good. There is one very, very big reason that scientists should be listened to when making policy: They are experts in their fields. I don't know very much about endangered species, or the science behind global climate change, and neither do elected public officials. That's why they rely on scientists to craft policy, especially at the minute level. "Saving endangered species" is a policy goal. Legislation that relies on science to determine when a species is endangered is a pretty straightforward result of that. But apparently that's not a good thing:

But some of our laws are not written that way. They require certain actions — such as listing a species as threatened, for example — in response to what the data show, not what the people want.

But voters still expect their elected officials to look out for them. An official can’t afford to say: “I’d like to help and I think you should have help, but the scientists tell me I should let you starve, so don’t bother me anymore.”

First of all, I'd be really surprised to see that Hering actually believes that "what the people want" matters. He only believes it when it matches his opinion. So that's just populist grandstanding.

Second, there's that strawman again. I can't believe I'm actually going to have to say this, but Hasso, no elected official is going to listen to a scientist that tells them they have to let people starve; for that matter, no scientist is going to say that - and certainly that's not what happened here with the Klamath farmers. That's just a stupid misrepresentation of what happened. I'm sure that in the case of an actual disaster for farmers, the federal government could provide aid in the form of emergency relief funding and subsidies to the farmers in the case they weren't able to irrigate. You know, like the aid that went to the fishing industry after the massive die-off that was the result of Cheney influencing policy to help his base?

Oh. Right. That. What about this:

The data show what they show, and unless they are manipulated, they should be taken as fact. But that doesn’t mean that politicians should have to do what the data show.

Do not wish for a country in which science rules without a political process that can act regardless of what the data show. In such a tyranny, science might say that the country can sustain 150 million people but not 300 million, and 150 million of us would have to go. (hh)

The first sentence....yes, Hering, you are correct. No one has to listen to the scientists, especially when they say things that make you feel bad and want to go to your room and cry. Just be aware that there can be massive consequences for ignoring science. Honestly, how can he expect people to believe this dreck? If we're supposed to ignore scientists when they say something we don't like - because that's all the rationale Hering ever provides for his "argument" - then how does he explain that computer he's typing on? The medications he takes? The glasses he wears? Any major scientific breakthrough is usually subject to attack and ridicule when it's new, since it usually requires people to change and/or challenges an established orthodoxy. By Hering's logic, we'd all by dead by now.

And don't even get me started on that last paragraph and its gas-chamber allusion. Let me ask this question: Hypothetically, what if the scientists who say that the carrying capacity of 150 million for the US land mass are correct? We'll ignore the science because it requires us to take radical, uncomfortable action, and then we'll all die due to resource depletion.

Hasso Hering is an idiot.